27-Jun-08

The credit crunch has gone from being an overnight crisis to daily reality, and the newspapers are full of commentators offering advice on how the current situation can be resolved.
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9-Jun-08

Stephen Knight is certainly right when he suggest that what we are living with is not a credit crunch as much as a liquidity freeze. The real problem is that the real credit crunch is just beginning. And through a combination of lack of Government intervention and a market acting with more emotion than analysis we are on the verge of a self-fulfilling downward spiral.
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5-Jun-08

The Association of Mortgage Intermediaries believes the market has lost the power to heal itself. Market participants have insufficient ability to address the underlying fault lines – and running through the sub-strata is a thread of commercial advantage being played out as some institutions seek to remodel the market for their own benefit. What the market cannot solve, public policy must, if consumers are not to be the main losers.

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29-May-08

I would like to make a suggestion as to how the problems of the outstanding MBS and their illiquidity, could be accomplished sooner, rather than later. If the timetable drags out till the next budget, in a Chancellor of the Exchequer style, it will be too late for many market participants and ultimately the consumer and the economy will suffer deeper and longer.
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22-May-08

The credit crunch is asking questions of everybody, including intermediaries. Without doubt these are doubly hard times for the intermediary market. It is quite fair to ask where are your friends when you need them? For a start, the FSA’s recent declaration that dual pricing has no consumer detriment made it clear where its sympathies lie. Meanwhile too many other commentators are struggling to achieve much except to remind us how awful our predicament is.
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9-May-08

Despite the colloquial attraction of the alliteration, this is not a credit crunch. UK mortgage collateral is performing quite well. It is a liquidity freeze. Banks will not lend to each other, the securitisation market is frozen, and existing securities and mortgage portfolios are changing hands at deep discounts to par.
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